The Bucket Theory

Sadly, no, this theory has nothing to do with Lolruses. Though it does involve blue and buckets (or bukkits if you prefer) This was a theory that I came up with later in highschool. I have observed people for some time and I find the principal behind this theory to have held true in all instances.

Do you remember a time when you were little and something happened that felt earth shattering? Your bestest friend told you you were a big meanie and they never ever wanted to talk to you again!? Another kid at school told you you had ugly glasses and you've never worn glasses again? You felt crushed, humiliated, and you go home and tell your mommy what happened and she didn't seem to care!!! She said "Oh it'll be allright, so and so will be your friend again, don't worry" or "Your glasses don't make you look ugly." But you know she's saying it because she's your mom and has to think you are cute. And it's said in this dismissive tone. This tone that suggests that rather than you've seen the four horsemen of the apocalypse, you just told her that there are some ants on the doorstep. She doesn't realize that this behavior over time is why you just started telling her school went "fine" in Jr. High and highschool, which she at that point complained about feeling alienated from you.

Now you look back and probably chuckle to yourself, saying, "How silly I was to worry about such small things, I don't eve know what that best friend is doing right now, I haven't heard from him in years!" What happened? Why are these earth shattering things not earth shattering? Because now you have different earth shattering things happening. You have a mortgage, and car loans. You have a jerk of a boss, or that co-worker who is an *** hole. What you haven't realized yet, is that these are actually the exact same things your mother dismissed in your life and you are willing to dismiss in your child's life. They are current, and they are your size, so they are "big" problems. Also they are falling into your life, not someone else's so they are your problems furthermore, making them appear bigger.

And here comes, the bucket theory:

Take a 5-gallon bucket and a shot glass, and fill them to the brim with water. (I don't mean near the brim, I mean I want to see surface tension over the rim) This is your life and your child's lives while you are under stress. You are full to the brim with the sum of your worries and experiences. Your worries today are actually partially generated by your experience from yesterday. Your child has 2 ounces of experience, you get 5 gallons. Now take a bottle of food coloring (blue because I promised there'd be blue) and drip a single drop into the shot glass. Notice: If you filled it like I told you to, you probably got some drippage over the side, also the entire shot glass will become a very brilliant blue in fairly short order.

At this point we are where you were at 5 years old telling your mom that your bestest friend hates you now. You experience it, you care about it, and you measure it against the 3 months of your friendship, during the entire time your friend has only said nice things to you. This new experience will color everything you see, likely for the rest of your life. You can add another drop of color because your mom doesn't own your problems with you. The drop is not in her bucket, she is not empathizing. See how much worse it just got made? Now you have another drop because mom has always wanted to hear about yoru problems and fix them and get you grilled cheese when you are hungry and get you a bike for Christmas and now she doesn't care when your bestest friend hates you! Your mom hates you too! again, at this point, the bucket is pristinely clear, and the shot glass is a deep deep blue and has run over onto the counter, and you've learned a lesson you'll carry with you for the rest of your life: Don't let people too close, don't let what they say matter. When you grow up, and you have your five gallon bucket, your water will still be blue from these drops that tainted your life. You won't even remember why it's blue, to you, that's just how life is!

Now lets say your mom empathizes with you. We add a blue drop to the 5 gallon bucket. Odds are you'll have no spillage, and the water will only turn lightly blue. It's a passing concern for mom still, because she is weighing it against her entire life of fairweather friends coming and going and she can pull comfort from the one or two close friends she's had for nearly twenty years! But this way she can instead tell you, That was't nice, was it? with a tone that acknowledges that you've seen the horsemen of the apocalypse, not an insect on the step outside.

Now let's fast forward to your mortgage payment. You've got 5 years of payments left and you realize that you've fallen behind on an electric bill you didn't catch. Now you have to pay for 3 missed months that your spouse was supposed to be paying, and you will miss this mortgage payment, the bank will get angry, your credit score will drop and you now look and see in the last few years you've stretched yourself so tight you worry you might not make it through the end of the mortgage at all! and what if you lose your job, or get hurt? You're taking two years of experience and dumping it into your five gallon bucket, at this point dump the shotglass into the bucket. It turns much bluer, and you get splash over. You get moody, cry, snap at your kids, because this is your problem that you are owning and it's your size.

What we all need to take a moment to realize is that these problems are proportionately similar. You realizing you've mismanaged for two years and all it's reprocussions are equivalent to your five year old self seeing 3 months of friendship get apparently flushed away with angry words. The passion and anger you feel right now is the same as the passion and disappointment you felt at 5. It's not that their problems aren't small, it's that how they feel about them are just as big as how you feel about yours.

The teenager who gets rejected by a girl feels as much rejection as the wife whose husband tells her that she's kind of let herself go after their last child was born 6 years ago. But we tell the teenager to suck it up, we yell at the husband for being insensitive.

The point of the bucket illustration is to demonstrate that disturbances in your life are proportionate. When you are 25 and your 5 year old sees a year's worth of work in jeapordy, you need to relate to that in terms of you sing 5 years of your life in jeapordy. Not passing Kintergarten can feel like having your college degree revoked! Having one girl say you are ugly at age 10 can feel the same as 5% of the women you know spontaneously telling you you are ugly (that would be one brutal month, let me tell you, if one in 20 women you knew just came up to you over the course of a month and told you that you are ugly!) Having your first crush reject you is like having every woman you asked out reject you (because to them, 100% of the girls they asked out said no!)

So when dealing with children, let's get down on their level and imagine a shotglass getting dropped into our bucket when they tell us about their bad day, and realize that a bad day for a 3 year old is like a bad week for a 30 year old and a bad month for a 90 year old! Suddenly the No Good Very Bad Day seems worse when it's your No Good Very Bad Week! or No Good Very Bad Month without a bowel movement!

Next time you find yourself wanting to open a big can of "I Don't Care" Recall the Bucket Theory.

Missing the Passion.

Passion is an interesting word. I'm sure we were all equally confused when Mel Gibson released "The Passion of the Christ" Unfortunately with the surroundings of "The DaVinci Code" I wonder how many people were surprised that Mary Magdelene made nothing more than a cameo appearance. Passion means everything from suffering to affection and love. I find it to be no coincidence that this one word means both indescribable pain and love at the same time.

It takes pain to make love. And I find increasingly that we do not have enough pain for ourselves in American society. Especially the Christian. We tune into Christian radio, and what do we hear? That God is good, and Jesus loves us, and how blessed we all are. Don't get me wrong, these are true. But we never feel a passion for the lost. We feel content to say "I don't want to push my beliefs on others, because it will only push them away from Jesus." The older I get, the more and more I find that these people are running from Jesus. They find comfort with the people who know Jesus (in the loosest sense possible) and do not condemn their sinful behavior. They take this to mean somehow, they are justified in their actions before God. This person knows God, right?

I think one of the most damaging things we can do as Christians is deny that sin is sin, and all too often we do this inadvertantly by not admitting to the caustic, dark, evil nature of sin. We treat it like every sin is just an "oops" and everyone is a well meaning human being so it won't hurt anyone will it? We ignore the fact that the very nature of Sin separates us from our creator and sustainer. When we live with unrepentant sin we're like an engine with a hole in the oil pan. The one thing keeping us from self destructing is slowly leaking away, and we like to say, "It's just a small leak."

The world has been advancing on the church, where the church is supposed to be invading the world. Have we become so stagnant that we get to discuss whether we should take part in our own governments as Christians? Let me clear this up right now, Separation of church and state is for the Church's protection from the state, not the other way around. Sure there should be a freedom of belief. Sure the government should not tell us what to believe. But the Government has been endowed with the power to tell us what to do, and the power to punish us if we choose to ignore it. Since our government takes it's direction from us, we have an obligation to ensure that the laws are Just, and give protection for the weakest among us, that these laws encourage righteousness, and not lawlessness. That these laws provide a framework that can bring a person to God, and when they find God, they will never need worry about man's government again, because their government beats so in tune with the Truth, that nothing good is illegal, and nothing illegal is good.

Yet again and again I find myself arguing with Christians who want laws repealed or want laws unmade that protect the weak, and encourage righteousness. Instead they want people of the world to have freedom to make themselves more captives of their sinful desires, furthermore, in ways that hurt and kill themselves and others. Christians who will support laws that force me to wear a seatbelt and a helmet, and yet allow others to kill their offspring, and their own bodies slowly.

So often their excuses are paltry: "we can't fully enforce it..." Right, we can't enforce the speed limit, so maybe we should get rid of that too. Hell, murder has been illegal for centuries, but it keeps happening, we suck at enforcing that, maybe we should just give up and let people do whatever they want! When will they grasp? The world has been lawless since Eve ate the apple, and Adam who was with her joined her in her rebellion. The lawless break laws, that is what they do! The laws are there to show them the right way to do things, They speak with their conscience. Instead we'd rather have people killing themselves with their conscience, and heaping more guilt on their own heads as punishment, while society looks idly by and tells them "You've done nothing wrong."

I'm just getting so tired of a church that lives like the world and defends the world's sinful and lawless actions. Yes I can't expect them to live like Christians, but I can expect those who profess Christ to mirror him, and Christ never told anyone "Go and keep on sinning, because you don't know me, it's ok." Every single person Christ touched helped and healed his full intention was to deliver them from Sin. Christ didn't abolish God's law, he didn't break God's law. He filled it so in him we could have the perfection we can't attain. And now Christians refuse to tell the world that they Need him for fear of "pushing them away" Instead we grant them a safe haven where they can reprimand their conscience. "This person is holy and they say I'm allright, so shut up, what I'm doing is not wrong!"

I think really we're afraid of what they'll say, afriad of what they'll think. We're the doctor who won't amputate an infected limb because we don't have enough anasthetic to make it not hurt, so instead we watch the patient die.

Maybe we Christians should act like Christians, just as the doctor should be a doctor, put a stick in the guy's mouth, put on a tourniquet, and hack off the limb, to save the man's life. We need to stop condoning sin by our silence, and encourage repentance that leads to salvation.

Generally speaking.

It was recently commented to me that we shouldn't generalize. The comment was relating to my generalizing of a people group, and they though't they'd strike home by saying I shouldn't generalize that group any more than they should generalize a list of groups they believed I belonged to. The issue: I think they SHOULD generalize these groups, especially if I am a member, and furthermore it's of paramount interest to me to see what "groups" people think I am in.

For starters, when they do it, I get for free what many corporations in america pay MILLIONS for: gague of public perception. Do you know how much Wal-Mart, for example, spends just to find out what people generally think of them? Enough that if they just gave it to me, I could comfortably retire right now, and never worry about money again. Why do people get so uptight about generalizations? I'm guessing it's because they took those labels, applied them to themselves, and now they think that they are "black" or "white" or "Christian" or "Atheist" which is rediculous. You may sympathize with many in one or all of these groups, but unless you're dense you know that everyone who shows up with these groups aren't actually a part of these groups. Case in point: our lovely president who seems to ignore his white side alltogether when more than a small amount of white stereotypes fit him very well!

"But they're offensive...." Yah, sure, they're offensive, and dog poop smells, get used to it! If they are offensive, you have yourself and everyone you know in your group to blame for it and no one else. What I've found generally is that generalizations are the unabashedly honest assessment of the majority in your group that appear to the public eye. Hence the statement of "Christians are Hypocrites" for starters, we haven't done a good job of correcting their definition, what they actually mean half the time is "Christians are sinners!" and if you disagree with that statement, you might want to recheck your theology to see if you really belong to Christianity, because you sound more like a product of modern psychology. The other half where they are correct, let's face it, we haven't done a good enough job of loudly decrying the teleevangelists who took the money and ran. We think that complaining about it in our christian books is enough, as if the rest of the world is reading those. (the rest of the world either can't read or chooses to watch the movie instead, or would rather read about making money, or flattening their abs) We really ought to loudly and publically decry those who profess one thing and live another. Not just in front of the church, but before the community as well.

Will this mean those church members cheating on their wives and abusing their children will get pushed away from the church? Probably. It also means that people look at the church and say "They mean what they preach, and they kick out the person who doesn't live it" Sure there's a place for outreach, like sunday morning, the superbowl party, wednesday nights... But there also needs to be an inner sanctum of members who define generally who we are as Christians. The people who are referenced in the generalization. And sad to say, generalizations as unflattering as they are... are usually right!

Where we run into trouble with generalizations is when we apply the entire group's generalizations to that guy. Sure white people are arrogant, ignorant, intolerant, and lacking in attention span... but when you go and point to mother theresa and say she's arrogant, ignorant, intolerant and lacking attention span, merely because she happens to be white... well there we begin to have a bit of friction.

The solution, if you dislike your stereotype, is simple: Disassociate from the group with the stereotype, or expell those who build the stereotype while living in such a way that anyone who meets you has to check their perception. All the while taking offense is an utter waste of time.

Trying to reason with the world using their rules will get your butt kicked every time. They don't only control the rules, they control the definitions and the labels. They will justify everything they do, and find someone to say what it is they want to hear, then they will lift them up as an authority, bestow an honorary PHD (or Nobel peace prize) for their hard work and point out that you don't have either of those things so clearly your opinion doesn't matter. Thus is the result of trying to shame the world into being accepting of you, just as they do to everyone else.

Generally: Generalizations are necessary to cope with people you've never met, and valuable to find out how each of us as groups are doing. Some groups that have used the generalization to their advantage (to perform Public Relations work to change the perception) Homosexuals, Blacks, Agnostics, and recently Atheists. Some groups that will just sit back and bitch at others who can see the generalizations (they didn't make them up themselves you know, they are hardly that clever) Whites, Christians, The French.